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Bush Aides Walk Delicate Line on Bin Laden

By Michael D. Shear May 4, 2011 7:37 amMay 4, 2011 7:37 am

Luke Sharrett/The New York TimesPresident Obama and former President George W. Bush in 2010.

For the better part of a decade, those at the helm of George W. Bush‘s political and national security teams argued that their approach to terrorism was a necessary means to a desired end: the takedown of Al Qaeda and its leadership.

So it’s not hard to imagine that Bush loyalists found themselves in an awkward place this week, as plaudits poured in for President Obama, whose military and intelligence team did what theirs could not: locate and kill Osama bin Laden.

The reaction from the former Bush aides demonstrated an almost total lack of partisanship. They vigorously cheered Bin Laden’s death, and they did not hold back praise for Mr. Obama.

“Congratulations also to President Obama and his national security team for their adroit leadership of this operation,” Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s top political adviser, wrote on FoxNews.com on Monday.

But Mr. Rove quickly added something to make it clear that the victory did not happen in a vacuum.

“And thanks is also due President Bush,” Mr. Rove wrote, “whose policies provided the tools that led to the discovery of Bin Laden’s hiding place.”

That, in a nutshell, is the delicate line that Bush supporters are walking in the days after Bin Laden’s death. In interviews, they say they are overjoyed by the death of the Qaeda leader, but they are quick to use the incident as a moment to defend the former president’s legacy.

Republican after Republican — and especially those who worked directly for Mr. Bush — have made sure that Mr. Bush’s name has closely followed behind Mr. Obama’s in the last 72 hours.

“I don’t think the Bush people feel the need to make sure the president gets credit for it. I think that’s fairly well understood,” said Sara Fagen, who served as Mr. Bush’s political director. “I don’t think there’s anything other than elation that it occurred.”

But, she added, “It’s not surprising that Bush administration officials who feel strongly about how President Bush waged the war on terror would want to remind people of some of the key facts and the key tenets of the effort.”

Ari Fleischer, who was Mr. Bush’s press secretary during his first term, said in an interview: “President Obama gets credit. It happened on his watch. The decision to use helicopters as opposed to aerial bombardment was extremely gutsy.”

Mr. Fleischer said that “this is too big for the feelings to be mixed.”

But like the others, Mr. Fleischer did not leave it there. “Does Bush get credit? Of course he does. But nothing says that credit in this country cannot go to two presidents,” he said.

The effort to defend and protect Mr. Bush’s legacy has continued since he left office, especially in the area of national security and terrorism. Until Mr. Bush’s memoir was published, the fiercest defender was former Vice President Dick Cheney.

But Mr. Cheney’s aggressive defense of the Bush legacy in the first months of the Obama presidency was pointed and often confrontational, as he sought to counter Mr. Obama’s efforts to dismantle a variety of Bush-era national security policies.

“Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy,” Mr. Cheney said in a speech in 2009. “When just a single clue that goes unlearned, one lead that goes unpursued can bring on catastrophe — it’s no time for splitting differences. There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance.”

The current effort to make sure Mr. Bush gets credit is far more gentle and nuanced than that.

Several Bush associates have pointed out that in the year and a half since Mr. Cheney’s harsh critique, the current president has decided to continue many of the Bush-era national security policies that he once derided, including maintaining the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.

Speaking on ABC on Monday, Mr. Cheney said that for himself and other Bush administration officials, “capturing Osama bin Laden was the ultimate goal. The ultimate objective.”

But he added that “it also looks, at least on a preliminary basis, based on press accounts, that a lot of the things that we did early on fed into this ultimate success. And I think that means positive things too about the overall policy approach.”

Appearing on NBC‘s “Today” show on Tuesday, Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state under Mr. Bush, made it plain that she saw the raid in Pakistan as a broader victory.

“The United States over many years and two presidencies pieced together the information of how to get to Osama bin Laden,” she said.

It is perhaps not surprising that Republicans like Ms. Rice have been eager to find a way to include Mr. Bush in their praise. But more noteworthy perhaps is another politician who picked up the phone to call Mr. Bush and thank him for contributing to Bin Laden’s death.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former Democratic House Speaker and a passionate critic of Mr. Bush, said she called the former president on Tuesday.

“He is a very friendly person, as you know, and he thanked me for my call,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters. “And I think he appreciated it. But I wanted him to know the appreciation that many of us have in a bipartisan way. We have all recognized in our public comments that his role was important in having this success.”

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